New Directions Proposal: Life Writing and Rhetorics of Violence: Aging, Identity, Secrets, and Silence, Part 1

Amy E. Robillard, Kathleen Daly, and Elizabeth Williams will present "Life Writing and Rhetorics of Violence: Aging, Identity, Secrets, and Silence, Part 1"

Abstract: How do we narrate violence in ways that elide the complexities of affective life in the early twenty-first century? How can contemporary life writing scholarship contribute to an understanding of violence in its myriad forms? This two-part presentation examines the rhetorics of violence across genres and disciplines, including children’s literature, memoir, and family history while theorizing the ways in which the narration of aging, identity, secrets, and silence itself constitutes a form of violence. This work, coming out of a semester-long inquiry embodying the central tenets of the English Studies model, reveals the complex multi-dimensionality of violence as it is conceptualized in transdisciplinary spaces.

Because this presentation represents the in(ter)dependent work of five English Studies scholars, we request a two-panel, back-to-back session. We plan to divide our time into a brief introduction and four robust presentations.

Kathleen Daly, Stephanie Guedet Scott, Debbie Parker, Amy Robillard, and Elizabeth Williams participated in what they like to call an interdependent study in Fall 2012 called Life Writing and Rhetorics of Violence. Their work together was interdisciplinary, collaborative, and intimate. As such, individual biographies would constitute a kind of rhetorical violence that their work refuses.